Commission members seek historical acknowledgment at Seabreeze Tavern
After county determined its necessary demolition, development plans to come forth
APTOS >> Due to a lack of structural integrity after its June 2020 fire, the county last month declared an emergency action to demolish the Seabreeze Tavern.
On Monday morning, Santa Cruz County Historic Resources Commission members demonstrated that they intend to be a part of the reconstruction phase of the property — particularly, how ownership intends to honor the lot’s historical origins.
The Seabreeze Tavern, soon to be torn down, was constructed in 1928 in the Spanish Revival Style. It is, according to the county’s Historic Resources Inventory, the last remaining building of the Raphael Castro Hotel and the only remaining building of the Aptos Land Company development. The Aptos Land Company development kickstarted the resort development of the Rio Del Mar community.
On June 14, the tavern experienced a fire that charred it from the inside out. Closed due to the pandemic, the building bought just beforehand by landholding company Champrey Rental Reo LLC was severely damaged. The roof was destroyed as well as the structural support in three of four walls. Among other losses determined by a structural engineer, the floor joists and top plates on the second floor lost their load-carrying capacity, according to a report from county staff member Annie Murphy.
At the time of the fire, the county made several attempts to contact Champery Rental Reo LLC to begin the process to protect the building in light of its historical significance. The company was unresponsive to requests to protect the building from further damage and outside entry. Murphy said during her report to the commission that after fire debris began being removed from the inside, very little progress was made.
In January, Omar Billawalla purchased the building and worked to cooperate with the county and its guidance. The damage was fully divulged in the first week of March after site inspections by Santa Cruz County Building Official Marty Heaney and the engineer’s analysis. At that time, the county decided to act quickly and utilized an exception to the requirement of holding a public hearing with the commission because it felt the conditions were so unsafe for the public.
In addition, the usual process of the county code that mandates ownership post advertisement of the possibility for removal or dismantling for salvage before demolition is impossible at this time, Murphy included, as the structure is subject to complete or partial collapse.
Being ‘bobbleheads’
As the revival of the property moves forward, Billawalla is responsible for providing documentation around preserving the historic values of the structure when he submits an application for development. Neither Murphy nor Heaney mentioned any possible uses for future development.
Staff suggested the inclusion of an interpretive panel in a location accessible to the public to honor the history of the site. The panel could include the architectural significance and the building’s significance to the development of Rio Del Mar, for example. Subsequently, staff recommended removing the property from the historical inventory as it no longer meets the designation criteria and has no architectural integrity.
Staff’s ideas made the commission frustrated, however. Longtime commissioner and former Capitola city historian Carolyn Swift said the report felt like a coordinated plan to avoid requirements enforced by the commission.
“It reduces the role of the commission to being bobbleheads,” she said, mentioning later that this feeling had arisen on more than one occasion when it came to the handling of historic properties.
Though Murphy informed the commission that there was no basis in the county code to ask the property owner to reconstruct the building to what it looked like when it was originally built, Swift and her colleagues illustrated serious determination to be a part of the reconstruction.
Pearlman asked that the panel idea be reinvented as those such as the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail panels placed by the County Administrator’s Office through north to mid county, panels that have already faded in the coastal sun. He suggested a miniature of a photograph picturing the original building in the ’20s, a statue that could be placed at the corner of the new building.
“If we could require something that would honor the original building was included, well then we wouldn’t be bobbleheads, would we?” asked Pearlman. “We’d be really influencing the long-term history of Rio Del Mar.”
Murphy will come back to the commission at its next quarterly meeting on July 12, more than a year after the fire, to disperse information on how involved the commission will be with the design of the new structure at the Seabreeze site and to revive conversation around where a display honoring the area’s history should go.
Elephant in the room
Frustration stretched into the context of the fire itself; commissioners such as Barry Pearlman felt as
though its cause was suspicious due to the timeline — the tavern was purchased, it burned and it was sold soon thereafter. Fire Marshal Mike DeMars, the lead investigator of the tavern fire, said Monday that no cause was ever confirmed. In fact, neighbors who came to him with hearsay insisted it was not the property owners but the former owner of a business housed in the building that they were allegedly working to evict, Rich McGinnis.
The fire was suspicious as it began outside the building
at the rear near the kitchen door when a pile of random objects such as old furniture and DVDs caught fire nowhere near a heat source, DeMars said. But the stories from the witnesses varied. McGinnis had allegedly been squatting in the building with his on-again, off-again girlfriend who was using the things in the pile that went up in flames to make money on eBay and other similar sites, DeMars was told.
Evidence was close to nonexistent.
“I will say that fortunately and unfortunately our guys are so good at their jobs they dropped so much water on that thing and probably washed away evidence if there was any. For instance, if the fire was started with a flammable (liquid), I’m not saying that it is but if it was, that would be (gone),” the fire marshal said.
He and his team watched the incident happen again in video footage submitted by a Cafe Rio employee.
“There’s nobody standing around, no smoking gun to speak,” DeMars said.